why you keep buying books you don’t read

I own 111 books. I've read 31 of them. That is 28%! Oh my god, this is awful. And I know what they say. Buying books and reading books are two entirely different hobbies. Buying books... and reading books... are different hobbies. But why? This book, hardcover, $29. I didn't get past the first page. In this economy? Why do I keep buying books I don't read and how do I stop? To figure it out, we are diving into the publishing industry, speaking with booksellers, and, of course, buying books we ma

y or may not read. Thank you to our patrons for supporting the channel, and Shopify for sponsoring this video. So, this problem has been on my mind recently, because I'm running out of shelf space, and with each unread book that I try and cram in there, I can't help but wonder if I even enjoy reading anymore. I know I used to. Growing up, I'd get through dozens of books a year. I'd ball out at Scholastic Book Fairs, I'd leave the library with more than I could carry. I was a bookworm. It was my

identity. And now I can't help but wonder if the thing compelling me to keep buying more books isn't actually the desire to read them, but the desire to be the person I was when I read more. A kid who didn't have to worry about groceries or taxes. It is a weirdly uncomfortable possibility, but it's finally time that I face it. So, I spent the next few weeks finally dealing with some of the unread books on my shelf. Eventually, an interesting pattern started to emerge. So, I was able to track tho

se patterns using these bookmarks I designed. I have a lot because I dedicate one bookmark to each book. At the top we have the title and author. Then we have the day I started reading it and the day I finished or decided to give up. Then we have a place for quick notes and a five-star rating. There's also another set on the bottom, in case I ever want to do a reread. Then on the back I tracked how frequently I read the specific book by using these bubbles. It allowed me to visualize if I took l

ong breaks, or if I really did finish a book in a handful of days. Weirdly enough, I think this makes me want to read more, because I just enjoy filling up the bubbles. Anyway, I know I could have used an app like Goodreads or StoryGraph or Italic Type. There's a million of them. But here's the thing, I'm a boomer. I genuinely do find those apps confusing, this is a me problem, and I think I just found that I prefer the simplicity of having a little card in a little book. I just know there're go

ing to be comments, so we're selling packs of five for just $6.50, with Patreon supporters getting a 20% discount. You can find them in our website store, which is powered by Shopify, a commerce platform that helps millions of businesses including bookstores, and now bookmark makers, sell in-person and online. I'll tell you how they made this bookmark release so much easier a little later. Anyway, in the past few weeks, I tried to read these six books. These are their cards. I'm going to have to

put them all back now. Anyway, I managed to get through three of them. These books were a fantastic reminder that I do love reading, existential crisis solved. Except I got a new one, because they're all genre fiction. With that, I wanted to see if the pattern held up for all of the books I've read. If they're all genre fiction, then it's pretty obvious what I should do. If they aren't, we'd be back at square one. What? Uh-oh! Look at where we are! So, of the 34 books I read, only 18 qualify as

genre fiction. That is barely over 50%. But we also have history, anthropology, oh, literary fiction! This one won the Man Booker Prize. I don't know what that means, but it has the word book in it. So, this shows that the type of book isn't actually a deciding factor on whether or not I read it. I've read Orientalism, a really wordy critique on the West's perception and portrayal of the East, but I've also read Fourth Wing, a book with dragons and kissing. So, to figure out why I keep buying b

ooks I don't read, I think we actually need to rewind past whether or not I've read them, and figure out why I bought them in the first place. BookTok, of course! This is Kariza. She's the one who convinced me to read Fourth Wing. You just read Fourth Wing, you have to read the ACOTAR series. I think that it's a BookTok classic. What is BookTok? It's a phenomenon on TikTok. BookTok feels like you are in this really fun club. If I was only going to read one book for the entirety of [inaudible 00:

04:27]... Five books that BookTok convinced me to purchase. And you have all these friends who you can geek out about. But it's so good, I can't stop reading! And it's exciting. I think it single-handedly saved the physical book economy. I thought she was being dramatic, but after doing some quick research, it turns out that BookTok is changing the game. I think the secret is that BookTok recommendations rarely have plot summaries or detailed reviews. Instead, they have... A vibe? Can you descri

be Fourth Wing for me? Hunger Games, Divergent vibes. It feels like it fits in that era, and everyone was in a frenzy, and I feel like the frenzy is back. Hearing Kariza say all of those very familiar talking points out loud in a human voice, compared to a TikTok with the text bubbles and copyrighted music, was surreal. That moment made me realize that BookTok recommendations are weirdly vague. It's like they focus on how a book makes you feel, instead of what it's about. And it works. I bought

all of these books because of BookTok, and I'm not alone. BookTok is driving sales, establishing careers, and extending the lifespan of its chosen novels. You've probably heard about how TikTok is changing music by making it easier to discover new artists, and also reviving the popularity of old songs. Well, it's doing the same thing for the publishing industry in a way that no other social media platform has managed before. But the thing that I find interesting is of these 19 books, I've read 1

2. That means that I am finishing my BookTok books 63% of the time. Now, if we compare that to my finishing rate for all of my other books, the ones that I found just by browsing in stores, it turns out that I am over twice as likely to finish reading my BookTok books. This means that if I want to solve the problem that is buying books I don't read, I just need to keep buying my BookTok recommendations, because they are books that I do read. Perfect! Problem solved. Except why is that true? It c

an't be the social component, because the people I talk to about books do not care about non-fiction. And it can't be because I'm making more informed decisions, because BookTok recommendations are comically vague. So, what else could the difference be between the videos that I find on here compared to in person? To help answer that question, I decided to talk to someone who knows a lot about both. So, I feel like publishing is pretty old school, and I think there's a divide there between folks

who are deciding what's good, and people in the world who are reading. And so social media is indicative of what people are reading and excited about, and they can't put it down. This is Chris. He owns Little Ghost, a viral Toronto-based bookshop and publisher that specializes in horror fiction. I wanted to get to the bottom of that disconnect that he talked about, but in order to do that, we first need to understand how the traditional publishing process works. So, you're an author and you writ

e a manuscript. Congratulations. If you want to follow the path of many great authors before you, you need a literary agent. They connect your manuscript with publishers. If a publisher chooses your manuscript, you get a book deal, and begin the months-long process that eventually turns your manuscript into a book. While your story is being polished, it's also being marketed and sold. The publisher works with retailers to figure out how many of your books to print and how prominently they'll be

displayed in stores. Now, those decisions are usually based off sales comps, forecasts built on how books similar to yours have performed in the past. Generally, the better the sales comps, the more faith and money the publisher will put into you and your book. At a glance, the traditional publishing process is this really understandable, well-oiled machine, right? So, where could it possibly break down, forming a divide between traditional and digital? If you have been in a bookstore in the hor

ror section, you might find the same five names. It's not that this stuff isn't being published, or that people aren't reading it, it's just not being given space in the same way. Now, that space is traditionally dictated by sales comps, and the idea of learning from history and past successes makes total sense, as long as we've always had a level playing field. However, there are plenty of folks who have been underrepresented throughout history, for reasons that aren't unique to publishing. So,

if an author exists in or at the intersection of any marginalized identity, they might be seen as too niche to market. In my opinion, this is where BookTok comes in. So, sometimes I have something on the shelf for two months and no one cares. And I'm like, "Well, that's too bad." And then all of a sudden, three months, four months from then, I guess some video or some reviewer has finally read it. There is a bit of a cushion between when a book comes out and when people start to feverishly buy

it. So, there is a reason why I read more of my BookTok books compared to books I discover by browsing in stores. BookTok is actually helping me cut through a lot of the barriers and noise that comes from traditional publishing, making it easier for me to discover books that suit my interests. Now interestingly, there are ways to do this without using TikTok. So, in our upcoming newsletter, I compiled a whole list on how to improve your book discovery process. But if you're somebody who already

has really great taste and wants to make money off it, I've also included a Shopify guide on how you can curate your own online bookstore. And now that we know how to buy better books, the video is over. Right? Why is there so much video left? Oh my God, this is going to sound so stupid. I started this video because I thought I wanted to stop buying books I don't read. Learn how to do that using industry knowledge and modern technology. If that is all you cared about, then this video genuinely i

s over and you can go buy better books now. However, this optimized approach probably also means that we should stop spending hours wandering around in bookstores. It would save us a lot of time and money. But what if I don't want that? I told you I was going to sound stupid! But even though it is inefficient, I don't want to give up browsing in person. Like this book, it was $29, never finished it, but, "A tale of reptiles, smugglers, and skullduggery"? Of course I had to give it a shot! I had

to! But why do I feel like that? Do I just love consumerism? I wanted to understand why I was so tempted to ignore and forget what we just spent a week figuring out. So, I returned to my notes to see if there was a reason hidden somewhere in my sources, something that explained why I believed inefficient browsing was worth keeping. And maybe it was good research, or maybe it was confirmation bias, but I think I found something. Here's my idea. A publisher making a book deal with an author is a l

ot like me browsing titles at a bookstore. We both have a ton of options, but limited information on whether a book will be successful. For me, a successful book is when I finish, but I can only go off what I've read before. For publishers, a successful book is one people buy, but they can only go off what people have bought before. The difference is that bookstores have been doing this for way longer and at a way larger scale than I have. So, with all that additional experience and context, how

do they avoid failure? They don't. It is actually kind of bonkers, but the CEO of Barnes & Noble said, "Up to 80% of middle grade hardcovers bought by B&N were routinely returned unsold to publishers. The rates of return for adult fiction were little better." What? With about a 20% success rate, that is about the same as me and the books I find through browse. And the similarities don't stop there! Publishers will either pulp these unsold titles, or mark them as remainders for discount and resa

le. So, the black dot, that's been around for a long time in the publishing business. So it basically means the book has been for sale somewhere and then it's been returned to the publisher's warehouse. Yeah, I'm Patrick Hempelmann, I've been running and owning this BMV bookstore for the last close to 30 years. BMV Books is a Toronto-based bookstore that offers a mix of new, used, and remaindered books. The shocking thing is, even up to this day, millions and millions of books get returned to wa

rehouses, and they're usually on the floor. So it's like huge areas of just thousands and thousands of titles on the floor. It's not easy though. A lot of those books, they get returned for a reason, because they're not the greatest books. So, the challenge is for us really to find those books that are still good titles, and relevant titles, and in demand titles. You might see 200,000 books, and we might pick a thousand. So, while places like BMV Books might give those unsold titles a second cha

nce, there are still tens of thousands that are gathering dust on shelves. Sound familiar? Now, there are a few reasons why publishers might print too many books. They might want to flood the market to get attention, or they might just suffer from some incorrect forecasting. However, this whole phenomenon has been happening for so long that there's something else that needs to be consistently justifying the cost of printing, shipping, returning, storing, and destroying all of these books. You kn

ow what it is, right? You know. Economics! Specifically, economies of scale. You see, books come in a lot of different shapes and sizes that are dictated, in part, by cost, and in part by what publishers think will help sales. This means that when you get a book printed, you have to change a printer's settings. But no one likes dealing with printers, not even print shops. So, they charge a high startup fee for all the trouble. But the good news is that once that nightmare is over, you literally

have a book printing machine, making the cost of printing additional books relatively cheap. So, you can make the cost of printing any individual book cheaper by spreading out that startup cost across more prints... To a point. But it all becomes worthwhile if you sell those books. And it's not just printing! Economies of scale can benefit all of the logistics it takes to get a book into your hands. Now, here's the thing. I don't buy books because I want to sell them. You probably don't either.

I buy books because I prefer to read like a monster. However, I still think that we can learn something from this approach, as long as you ignore your initial disgust at economics. You see, even if a publisher is benefiting from decreased unit costs, oh God, if the books don't sell, it's still a cost. Oh God! Yeah, I'll do it from the other side. I'm going to show you how to fold a portable green screen. How did he make his look like that? We're cutting, this is stupid. I got it. Anyway, all of

these costs are just something that the publishing industry has come to accept, and even embrace, on the chance that a story thrives. In a world where other creative industries are suffering because the people with money don't want to take risks, this imperfect approach is kind of refreshing. I think in a way it kind of makes sense, because otherwise bookstores would never take a chance on certain books, and it gives especially new authors a chance to become known. Authors were having trouble fi

nding places to put their stories that were weirder, queer, more niche, and in order to serve the community who came here better, this seemed like the logical next step. We're like, "Okay, fine. No section for us? We build section now!" I've always known that it's important to give people and their ideas a chance. It's just that after all of this, it's the first time I realized that those chances come with risks. Maybe it's just my math degree speaking, but I always figured that there was a way

to do enough numbers to make that risk zero. But there isn't, not for the things that matter. But that isn't a bad thing. When you have the chance to turn your idea into a reality, like authors with their stories, or me with my bookmark, suddenly that risk is exciting. It is just this chance to see the thing that you made out there in the world resonating with someone, anyone. To be fully transparent, I have ordered over 2000 bookmarks, knowing that nobody might buy them. Fortunately, that is th

e only thing I need to stress out about, since Shopify brings together everything else we need to run a store into one streamlined platform. From managing inventory, handling payments, and recording analytics, that's why we always use Shopify. From back when we sold the Curiosity Journal, updated version might be coming soon, my Pi poster, to now this bookmark. But on top of Shopify's core services, they also connect to thousands of third-party apps that help you customize things even further, l

ike translating your store, or printing products on demand. If you want to take a chance on yourself and your ideas, you should start with Shopify. Learn more at Shopify.com/answerinprogress. So, now I understand why I still want to browse for books and buy them, even though I have a 20% chance of finishing them. It's because it can be really fulfilling, just wandering through shelves that no social media algorithm would've ever shown you. But that's okay, because you are more than the sum of yo

ur watch history, and you imagine how a book might change you. What kind of person will you become? What communities will you join? What issues do you care about enough to learn more? And sure, sometimes you get it wrong, and you end up with a box full of books you need to resell or recycle. But when you get it right, when a book that you plucked off of the shelf makes you feel something, a lot of things, deep in your chest, or other places, if that's what you're into, it has this way of making

you forget about all of the losses and making those risks worthwhile. So, we should be thoughtful about the books that we buy, of course. We should be more thoughtful about buying anything. But we also shouldn't let the fear of failure stop us from exploring, for taking risks on a great story. Or we should renew our library cards. But either way, have a lovely day.